Tag Archives: The Secret Garden

For a long time, The Secret Garden has reigned supreme as my favourite book, but in January 2017, its forty-year rule of my Favourites bookshelf came to an end. Which children’s book knocked Frances Burnett Hodgson’s classic from its perch? Read to the end to find out!

The Secret Garden is the book that turned me into a lifelong reader and planted the seed of desire to write books. Why exactly did it make such a lasting impression on me? Was it about the book? Content, character, setting, cover design? Or was it about the reader? Age, readiness, timing? These are questions I’m pondering as a creator of children’s literature. What makes a book a classic?

A Book Hugger is Born

I distinctly remember finishing The Secret Garden and clutching it to my heart. I turned back to the first page and hovered there for a moment, tempted to start over then and there just to extend my time with the characters in their world.

I didn’t reread it. Instead, I savoured the delicious post-book thrill. With a rainbow of emotions zinging through me, I felt as if my heart had strings and someone had strummed a mysterious new chord. Happiness and satisfaction vibrated on the high notes, while loss and longing thrummed on the low.

Sounds Almost Psychedelic…

What was it that made my eleven-year-old heart swoon for The Secret Garden? My guess: neurochemicals. A crazy literature-triggered cocktail of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin made me go gaga and googly-eyed over a book.

Dopamine is the main neurotransmitter of the brain’s reward and pleasure system. It plays a positive part in bonding, love, sex, and motivation, and on the negative side, it is a factor in all kinds of addictions. I haven’t been able to find any quality research proving that reading great books triggers the release dopamine, but if computer games, television and music can, I don’t see why good books can’t.

It’s all about Pleasure &Reward.

If a reading habit starts very young, children learn to associate books with all sorts of pleasant, happy things like comfort, safety, and positive attention. Books equal nurturing.

Parents can set the stage for a lifetime of reading, but what about the writers of children’s literature? Can we maximise the pleasure and reward factors of books? I think so! If we tick these boxes, we can make the reading experience truly memorable and rewarding.

Connection

Relatable characters increase readers’ engagement with the story. Now, this is coming from someone who dislikes the word relatable. However, remember: one of the reasons kids (everybody, really) read is because they don’t want to feel alone. They (we) seek connection and validation. So give kids characters that ring true. Make your protagonist not too perfect. Stick a thorn in their flesh, a flaw that they have to master. And relatable doesn’t mean vague or blank or ‘insert a you-shaped facsimile here’; it means authentic. Little details, funny quirks, secret foibles and fears—these are the things that make characters relatable. (Read this for food for thought on ‘relatability‘).

In The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox was a sour, unlikable little girl, which would seem ‘unrelatable’. She had suffered a lot, having lost parents to typhoid and been transplanted to the other side of the world to live with strangers. Few kids today can relate to this, but most children have had moments of being contrary or have said horrible things or felt angry at everyone. Mary is relatable because her response to loss is authentic.

Significance

Make the stakes high and also meaningful to kids. Who cares about an evil madman who wants to rule the universe unless it impacts your kid protagonist personally (and your young reader vicariously)? The madman’s sinister deeds have to threaten the protagonist’s school or soccer team, and the outcome has to change the hero—not just save the universe for another rotation of the earth on its axis. Your readers must care about both the problem and the outcome.

Mary Lennox lost everything, so the question is: is restoration possible? Can she ever belong again? Can her frozen heart thaw? The garden is a metaphor for the healing of the characters and the blossoming of hope and possibility. If Mary and the garden can regenerate and flourish, it gives readers hope that they too can heal and thrive.

Agency

Give the protagonists as much agency as possible. The kid heroes, not their parents or teachers, must be the primary doers. The heroes must be pint-sized (or more or less the size of your readers) but supremely resourceful. The best way to ramp up the reward/pleasure factor is to make the kid save the day by sheer determination and clever thinking. Avoid adult saviours and magical shortcuts for maximum reader satisfaction.

Mary Lennox is left to her own devices at Misselthwaite Manor, which is sad for a child who’s lost her parents and her home. Mary uses her freedom to her advantage. Unencumbered by adult interference, she seeks and finds; she toils and reaps; she makes herself vulnerable and wins. And in all this doing, she changes, heals herself and helps others.

Senses

Dickon with his sweet nature is a wonderful foil for sour Mary Lennox. Compare mollycoddled Colin Craven who’s restricted to a dreary room and rigid routine for his lifetime to a girl who experienced the colourful world of India and roamed the lonely moors, a girl about whom no one cared a bit, not her distracted, socialite parents when they were alive, and not her heartsore, distant uncle. These contrasts are brilliant showing exercises to help the reader zero in on the frustrations and experience the truths in their starkness.

My New All Time Favourite Book

The Secret Garden was supremely satisfying, but I recently read another book that pipped it. Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea surpassed my old favourite. I loved it from cover to cover, and when I turned the last page, I burst into tears, startling my husband. “It’s the best book I’ve ever read,” I sobbed.

That perfect, mysterious chord of emotions thrummed in my soul: elation at the satisfying resolution; loss at leaving the world and its inhabitants behind. Professional jealousy and inspiration vied uncomfortably inside me. Here’s a link to my Goodreads review.

Journey to the River Sea ticks all of the boxes—and then some! Twists galore, fantastic characters, hateful villains, a setting to swoon over…

Significance – What greater need than to find a place where you belong and matter.

Agency– Maia is resourceful and brave in bucket loads. Her governess, Miss Minton says, “Children must lead big lives… if it is in them to do so.” With this belief firmly fixed, she lets Maia star, doing all the exploits and working out the puzzles on her own.

Senses – a feast. It’s set in Manaus, Brazil along the Amazon at the turn of the century. The characters are British and very much out-of-place, but it is one’s attitude that makes all the difference.

My Aspiration

My highest goal as a children’s writer is to create for my young readers that singular experience of exalting in the joy of reading. I won’t mind a bit if a few neurotransmitters enhance the moment and motivate kids to keep reading!

The Guardian‘s fantastic article Children’s Books Are Never Just For Children makes some great points about children’s literature and the value society places on it. As a creator and advocate of children’s literature, I devoured the article and followed it with some serious soul-searching.

Aside from the fact that kidlit is HOT right now–accounting for one in four books sold in the UK in 2014–this zone of the literary landscape is exhilarating. Welcome to the quest to create outstanding children’s literature, where mere word-smithery won’t do. Art is the aim.

Kidlit is High Quality

Phillip Pullman, author of The Amber Spyglass, turns the perfect phrase to describe the language of enduring children’s literature: “Perfect lightness and grace.” Kids’ books are designed to be reread, which means that every word is refined, polished, and arranged to perfection. Not a comma is wasted. Neil Gaiman told The Guardian he might not be able to justify every word in (his book for grown-ups) American Gods, but he sure could in (his children’s classic) Coraline.

Picture books require a mind-bending economy of words. Anyone who thinks they can whip off a good 500-word book has clearly never tried. Sure, with practice, a writer can push out a story, but to create one that is multi-layered and timeless is a feat few achieve.

Kidlit Stands the Test of Time

Consider the wonder of the enduring favourites of children’s literature: The Chronicles of Narnia, Pippi Longstocking, the works of E Nesbit or Enid Blyton, and more. Where the Wild Things Are is the epitome of timelessness.

My mother read the Madeline books to me in the sixties, and I read them to my children in the nineties, and they were just as charming the second time around. I am looking forward to introducing them to my grandchildren one day–maybe in the twenties?

It’s striking how long children’s books can last. One explanation may be the way in which they’re read. They become part of our emotional autobiographies, acquiring associations and memories, more like music than prose. –SF Said

I love the concept of “emotional autobiographies.” These associations with literature are powerful and positive. Just writing the word Madeline above conjured up for me a banquet of memories and images–first trips to the library with the peculiar smells and sounds of that place, the security and comfort of sitting on my mother’s lap, discovering the gentle pleasure of reading for myself.

One of my most poignant childhood memories was the rush of elation at the age of 11 as I turned the last page of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I fell in love with books then and there. As a writer of children’s literature, I long to reproduce that specific experience for a new generation of readers with evocative, inviting stories of my own.

The Guardian‘s article mentions AA Milne, who’s remembered not for his wonderful West End plays, but rather for his endearing Winnie the Pooh books. Even Salman Rushdie believes it is his children’s literature that will continue to be read into the future. A noble brand of immortality is rewarded to the writer who succeeds in creating enduring children’s literature.

Longevity and fame are not the prizes I yearn for from my writing. I want to spread a little love, hope, and joy to the kids who read my stories. If my books endure–all the better. I will be content to contribute to the happy “emotional autobiography” of my readers–and their parents. Because, after all, children’s books are never just for children.

Books are sensorily stimulating for me. (That's a stuffy way way of saying that books turn me on.) The feel of paper under my fingertips, the intoxicating smell of ink on the page, that delicious crunch of a spine first opened…Thinking about books gives me a lovely little whir of anticipation in my soul.

Yeah, I know–it's only a rush of dopamine flooding the reward centre of my brain, but we're talking about a serious case of book-love here, so let's not get all clinical. The fact is fabulous stories make me swoon.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is from sixth grade when I finished reading Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden for the first time. It was my first book-crush, and I was completely smitten. I turned the last page and was overcome with a wash of gratitude and loss and joy. I hugged the book to my chest, dreading the loss of Mary, Dickon and Colin and Misselthwaite Manor, but relishing the experience at the same time. I was in love with a story–and with the feeling evoked by the story.

Illustrations by Inga Moore, Walker Books, 2007

I actually felt heart-sick with a yearning to create a similar beauty, to recreate a literary experience for others that left them giddy and delighted and sad to say good-bye. The desire to write books was born in me at that moment. I dreamed of one day mastering the particular magic of storytelling.

A few decades have come and gone, and I can happily tell you books still do it for me. Like selkies on the rocks, they call to me with their gorgeous covers and promises of escape, and looking is never enough. I have to touch and hold and possess. I'm an adult, yet stories still have the power to sweep me and all my grown-up pretensions away. It seems I'm never too old for a case of literary euphoria. Yes, I can still go ga-ga over a book.

And as for that 11-year-old's dream of writing books, I'm not a fully-fledged, card-carrying, storytelling magician yet, but I'm well on my way.

Oh My Garden!

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Header Art Attribution

The whimsical illustration in the header is the work of a German artist at Mystic Art Design. The work is designated CC0, Public Domain. I am awed by the artist's talent and appreciative of their generosity in making the work available.

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